13 Tales of Terror

by Algernon Blackwood

  And her voice, when she spoke, was firm with a note of steel in it; intense, yet devoid of the wasting anger that passion brings. She was determined beyond Death itself, upon a foundation sure and lasting as the stars. The heart in her was calm, because she knew. She was magnificent.

  'We are together -- always,' she said, her voice rich with the knowledge of some unfathomable experience, 'for separation is temporary merely, forging new links in the ancient chain of lives that binds our hearts eternally together.' She looked like one who has conquered the adversity Time brings, by accepting it. 'You speak of the Present as though our souls were already fitted now to bid it stay, needing no further fashioning. Looking only to the Future, you forget our ample Past that has made us what we are. Yet our Past is here and now, beside us at this very moment. Into the hollow cups of weeks and months, of years and centuries, Time pours its flood beneath our eyes. Time is our schoolroom.... Are you so soon afraid? Does not separation achieve that which companionship never could accomplish? And how shall we dare eternity together of we cannot be strong in separation first?'

  I listened while a flood of memories broke up through film upon film and layer upon layer that had long covered them.

  'This Present that we seem to hold between our hands,' she went on in that earnest, distant voice, 'is our moment of sweet remembrance that you speak of, of renewal, perhaps, too, of reconciliation -- a fleeting instant when we may kiss again and say good-bye, but with strengthened hope and courage revived. But we may not stay together finally -- we cannot -- until long discipline and pain shall have perfected sympathy and schooled our love by searching, difficult tests, that it may last forever.'

  I stretched my arms out dumbly to take her in. Her face shone down upon me, bathed in an older, fiercer sunlight. The change in her seemed in an instant then complete. Some big, soft wind blew both of us ten thousand miles away. The centuries gathered us back together.

  'Look, rather, to the Past,' she whispered grandly, 'where first we knew the sweet opening of our love. Remember, if you can, how the pain and separation have made it so worthwhile to continue. And be braver thence.'

  She turned her eyes more fully upon my own, so that their light persuaded me utterly away with her. An immense new happiness broke over me. I listened, and with the stirrings of an ampler courage. It seemed I followed her down an interminable vista of remembrance till I was happy with her among the flowers and fields of our earliest pre-existence.

  Her voice came to me with the singing of birds and the hum of summer insects.

  'Have you so soon forgotten,' she sighed, 'when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft, to us in the dawn of the world? And do you not remember,' with a little rise of passion in her voice, 'the sweet plantations of Chaldea, and how we tasted the odour of many a drooping flower in the gardens of Alcinous and Adonis, when the bees of olden time picked out the honey for our eating? It is the fragrance of those first hours we knew together that still lies in our hearts to-day, sweetening our love to this apparent suddenness. Hence comes the full, deep happiness we gather so easily To-day.... The breast of every ancient forest is torn with storms and light....., that's why it is so soft and full of little gardens. You have forgotten too easily the glades of Lebanon, where we whispered our.earliest secrets while the big winds drove their chariots down those earlier skies...'

  There rose an indescribable tempest of remembrance in my heart as I strove to bring the pictures into focus; but words failed me, and the hand I eagerly stretched out to touch her own, met only sunshine and the rain of apple blossoms.

  'The myrrh and frankincense,' she continued in a sighing voice that seemed to come with the wind from invisible caverns in the sky, 'the grapes and pomegranates -- have they all passed from you, with the train of apes and peacocks, the tigers and the ibis, and the hordes of dark-faced slaves? And this little sun that plays so lightly here upon our woods of beech and pine -- does it bring back nothing of the old-time scorching when the olive slopes, the figs and ripening cornfields heard our vows and watched our love mature?... Our spread encampment in the Desert -- do not these sands upon our little beach revive its lonely majesty for you, and have you forgotten the gleaming towers of Semiramis ... or, in Sardis, those strange lilies that first tempted our souls to their divine disclosure...?'

  Conscious of a violent struggle between pain and joy, both too deep for me to understand, I rose to seize her in my arms. But the effort dimmed the flying pictures. The wind that bore her voice down the stupendous vista fled back into the caverns whence it came. And the pain caught me in a vice of agony so searching that I could not move a muscle. My tongue lay dry against my lips. I could not frame a word of any sentence....

  Her voice presently came back to me, but fainter, like a whisper from the stars. The light dimmed everywhere; I saw no more the vivid, shining scenery she had summoned. A mournful dusk instead crept down upon the world she had momentarily revived.

  '.... we may not stay together,' I heard her little whisper, 'until long discipline shall have perfected sympathy, and schooled our love to last. For this love of ours is forever, and the pain that tries it is the furnace that fashions precious stones....'

  Again I stretched my arms out. Her face shone a moment longer in that forgotten fiercer sunlight, then faded very swiftly. The change, like a veil, passed over it. From the place of prodigious distance where she had been, she swept down towards me with such dizzy speed. As she was To-day I saw her again, more and more.

  'Pain and separation, then, are welcome,' I tried to stammer, 'and we will desire them' -- but my thought got no further into expression than the first two words. Aching blotted out coherent utterance.

  She bent down very close against my face. Her fragrance was about my lips. But her voice ran off like a faint thrill of music, far, far away. I caught the final words, dying away as wind dies in high branches of a wood. And they reached me this time through the droning of bees and of waves that murmured close at hand upon the shore.

  '... for our love is of the soul and our souls are moulded in Eternity. It is not yet, it is not now, our perfect consummation. Nor shall our next time of meeting know it. We shall not even speak.... For I shall not be free....' was what I heard. She paused.

  'You mean we shall not know each other?' I cried, in an anguish of spirit that mastered the lesser physical pain.

  I barely caught her answer:

  'My discipline then will be in another's keeping -- yet only that I may come back to you ... more perfect ... in the end....'

  The bees and waves then cushioned her whisper with their humming. The trail of a deeper silence led them far away. The rush of temporary darkness passed and lifted. I opened my eyes.

  My love sat close beside me in the shadow of the poplars. One hand held both my own, while.with the other she arranged my pillows and stroked my aching head. The world dropped back into a tiny scale once more.

  'You have had the pain again,' Marion murmured anxiously, 'but it is better now. It is passing.' She kissed my cheek. 'You must come in....'

  But I would not let her go. I held her to me with all the strength that was in me. 'I had it, but it's gone again. An awful darkness came with it,' I whispered in the little ear that was so close against my mouth. 'I've been dreaming,' I told her, as memory dipped away, 'dreaming of you and me -- together somewhere -- in old gardens, or forests -- where the sun was --’

  But she would not let me finish. I think, in any case, I could not have said more, for thought evaded me, and any language of coherent description was in the same instant beyond my power.

  Exhaustion came upon me, that vile, compelling nausea with it.

  'The sun here is too strong for you, dear love,' I heard her saying, 'and you must rest more.

  We have been doing too much these last few days. You must have more repose.' She rose to help me move indoors.

  'I have been unconscious then?' I asked, in
the feeble whisper that was all I could manage.

  'For a little while. You slept, while I watched over you.'

  'But I was away from you! Oh, how could you let me sleep, when our time together is so short?'

  She soothed me instantly in the way she knew we both loved so. I clung to her until she released herself again.

  'Not away from me,' she smiled, 'for I was with you in your dreaming.'

  'Of course, of course you were'; but already I knew not exactly why I said it, nor caught the deep meaning that struggled up into my words from such unfathomable distance.

  'Come,' she added, with her sweet authority again, 'we must go in now. Give me your arm, and I will send out for the cushions. Lean on me. I am going to put you back to bed.'

  'But I shall sleep again,' I said petulantly, 'and we shall be separated.'

  'We shall dream together,' she replied, as she helped me slowly and painfully towards the old grey walls of the chiteau.

  II Half an hour later I slept deeply, peacefully, upon my bed in the big stately chamber where the roses watched beside the latticed windows.

  And to say I dreamed again is not correct, for it can only be expressed by saying that I saw and knew. The figures round the bed were actual, and in life. Nothing could be more real than the whisper of the doctor's voice -- that solemn, grave-faced man who was so tall -- as he said, sternly yet brokenly, to some one: 'You must say good-bye; and you had better say it now.' Nor could anything be more definite and sure, more charged with the actuality of living, than the figure of Marion, as she stooped over me to obey the terrible command. For I saw her face float down towards me like a star, and a shower of pale spring blossoms rained upon me with her hair.

  The perfume of old, old gardens rose about me as she slipped to her knees beside the bed and kissed my lips -- so softly it was like the breath of wind from lake and orchard, and so lingeringly it was as though the blossoms lay upon my mouth and grew into flowers that she planted there.

  'Good-bye, my love; be brave. It is only separation.'

  'It is death,' I tried to say, but could only feebly stir my lips against her own.

  I drew her breath of flowers into my mouth ... and there came then the darkness which is final.

  The voices grew louder. I heard a man struggling with an unfamiliar language. Turning restlessly, I opened my eyes -- upon a little, stuffy room, with white walls whereon no pictures hung. It was very hot. A woman was standing beside the bed, and the bed was very short. I stretched, and my feet kicked against the boarding at the end.

  'Yes, he is awake,' the woman said in French. 'Will you come in? The doctor said you might see him when he woke. I think he'll know you.' She spoke in French. I just knew enough to understand.

  And of course I knew him. It was Haddon. I heard him thanking her for all her kindness, as he blundered in. His French, if anything, was worse than my own. I felt inclined to laugh. I did laugh.

  'By Jove! old man, this is bad luck, isn't it? You've had a narrow shave. This good lady telegraphed --’

  'Have you got my ice-axe? Is it all right?' I asked. I remembered clearly the motor accident -- everything.

  'The ice-axe is right enough,' he laughed, looking cheerfully at the woman, 'but what about yourself? Feel bad still? Any pain, I mean?'

  'Oh, I feel all right,' I answered, searching for the pain of broken bones, but finding none.

  'What happened? I was stunned, I suppose?'

  'Bit stunned, yes,' said Haddon. 'You got a nasty knock on the head, it seems. The point of the axe ran into you, or something.'

  'Was that all?'

  He nodded. 'But I'm afraid it's knocked our climbing on the head. Shocking bad luck, isn't it?'

  'I telegraphed last night,' the kind woman was explaining.

  'But I couldn't get there till this morning,' Haddon said. 'The telegram didn't find me till midnight, you see.' And he turned to thank the woman in his voluble, dreadful French. She kept a little pension on the shores of the lake. It was the nearest house, and they had carried me in there and got the doctor to me all within the hour. It proved slight enough, apart from the shock.

  It was not even concussion. I had merely been stunned. Sleep had cured me, as it seemed.

  'Jolly little place,' said Haddon, as he moved me that afternoon to Geneva, whence, after a few days' rest, we went on into the Alps of Haute Savoie, 'and lucky the old body was so kind and quick. Odd, wasn't it?' He glanced at me.

  Something in his voice betrayed he hid another thought. I saw nothing 'odd' in it at all, only very tiresome.

  'What's its name?' I asked, taking a shot at a venture.

  He hesitated a second. Haddon, the climber, was not skilled in the delicacies of tact.

  'Don't know its present name,' he answered, looking away from me across the lake, 'but it stands on the site of an old chateau -- destroyed a hundred years ago -- the Château de Bellerive.'

  And then I understood my old friend's absurd confusion. For Bellerive chanced also to be the name of a married woman I knew in Scotland -- at least, it was her maiden name, and she was of French extraction.

  THE TERROR OF THE TWINS

  That the man's hopes had built upon a son to inherit his name and estates -- a single son, that is -- was to be expected; but no one could have foreseen the depth and bitterness of his disappointment, the cold, implacable fury, when there arrived instead -- twins. For, though the elder legally must inherit, that other ran him so deadly close. A daughter would have been a more reasonable defeat. But twins --! To miss his dream by so feeble a device --!

  The complete frustration of a hope deeply cherished for years may easily result in strange fevers of the soul, but the violence of the father's hatred, existing as it did side by side with a love he could not deny, was something to set psychologists thinking. More than unnatural, it was positively uncanny. Being a man of rigid self-control, however, it operated inwardly and doubtless along some morbid line of weakness little suspected even by those nearest to him, preying upon his thought to such dreadful extent that finally the mind gave way. The suppressed rage and bitterness deprived him, so the family decided, of his reason, and he spent the last years of his life under restraint. He was possessed naturally of immense forces -- of will, feeling, desire; his dynamic value truly tremendous, driving through life like a great engine; and the intensity of this concentrated and buried hatred was guessed by few. The twins themselves, however, knew it. They divined it, at least, for it operated ceaselessly against them side by side with the genuine soft love that occasionally sweetened it, to their great perplexity. They spoke of it only to each other, though.

  'At twenty-one,' Edward, the elder, would remark sometimes, unhappily, 'we shall know more.' 'Too much,' Ernest would reply, with a rush of unreasoning terror the thought never failed to evoke -- in him. 'Things father said always happened -- in life.' And they paled perceptibly. For the hatred, thus compressed into a veritable bomb of psychic energy, had found at the last a singular expression in the cry of the father's distraught mind. On the occasion of their final visit to the asylum, preceding his death by a few hours only, very calmly, but with an intensity that drove the words into their hearts like points of burning metal, he had spoken. In the presence of the attendant, at the door of the dreadful padded cell, he said it: 'You are not two, but one. I still regard you as one. And at the coming of age, by h --, you shall find it out!'

  The lads perhaps had never fully divined that icy hatred which lay so well concealed against them, but that this final sentence was a curse, backed by all the man's terrific force, they quite well realised; and accordingly, almost unknown to each other, they had come to dread the day inexpressibly. On the morning of that twenty-first birthday -- their father gone these five years into the Unknown, yet still sometimes so strangely close to them -- they shared the same biting, inner terror, just as they shared all other emotions of their life -- intimately, without speech.

  During the daytime they ma
naged to keep it at a distance; but when the dusk fell about the old house they knew the stealthy approach of a kind of panic sense. Their self-respect weakened swiftly . . . and they persuaded their old friend, and once tutor, the vicar, to sit up with them till midnight . . . He had humoured them to that extent, willing to forgo his sleep, and at the same time more than a little interested in their singular belief -- that before the day was out, before midnight struck, that is, the curse of that terrible man would somehow come into operation against them.

  Festivities over and the guests departed, they sat up in the library, the room usually occupied by their father, and little used since. Mr. Curtice, a robust man of fifty-five, and a firm believer in spiritual principalities and powers, dark as well as good, affected (for their own good) to regard the youths' obsession with a kindly cynicism. 'I do not think it likely for one moment,' he said gravely, 'that such a thing would be permitted. All spirits are in the hands of God, and the violent ones more especially.' To which Edward made the extraordinary reply: 'Even if father does not come himself he will -- send!' And Ernest agreed: 'All this time he's been making preparations for this very day. We've both known it for a long time -- by odd things that have happened, by our dreams, by nasty little dark hints of various kinds, and by these persistent attacks of terror that come from nowhere, especially of late. Haven't we, Edward?' Edward assenting with a shudder. 'Father has been at us of late with renewed violence. To-night it will be a regular assault upon our lives, or minds, or souls!'

  'Strong personalities may possibly leave behind them forces that continue to act,' observed Mr.

  Curtice with caution, while the brothers replied almost in the same breath: 'That's exactly what we feel so curiously. Though -- nothing has actually happened yet, you know, and it's a good many years now since -- '